PERSONAL COLUMN

The snobberies of the expense-account Left

PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE

at is it that makes progressive leftish intel- tuals really angry today? Is it Eton and arrow, the Ritz Hotel, the Stock Exchange, lenheim and Chatsworth, White's Club or die's, or any other citadel of upper class vilege? No, it is not. When they write ut such places it is always with some caking sympathy, if not open indulgence. eed, it is difficult to recall a healthy atribe against these targets for years and Ts, even in the columns of Tribune.

What I can remember, however, is a eam of progressive leftish vituperation dressed to, of all places, Blackpool. Every e the party conferences are held at Black- ! some journalistic champion of the pro- essive cause will take time off to write an usive article about Blackpool. The sight the idle rich at play no longer provokes e progressive's indignation. They will wax cal about the joys of St Tropez and sitano, at the drop of a free ticket, or even thout one. But let them get so much as a mpse of the working class enjoying them- ves and they blow their top.

Blackpool, it seems, offends against the ntemporary idea of what socialism is all out. Socialism, according to the progres- 'e high priest, Anthony Crosland, is about proving the quality of life—a process to rich Blackpool is peculiarly resistant. It is !gar and ugly, dirty and dilapidated, serves with oysters, advertises crude, racialist ctacles like 'a negress with two heads', ks a sufficiency of ice cubes, has no bidets, d not even enough bathrooms.

If you want to know what Blackpool is e, imagine a seaside resort designed to be unlike anything recommended in the ssy magazines as conceivably possible and u will just about have it. Yet the trouble that it continues to be immensely popular. orking class families still flood to it from over, and actually enjoy themselves, the tes.

They are the new traitors to socialism, the cked, reactionary monsters who, instead of uggling to create a new Jerusalem, are per- tly happy with Blackpool. Blackpool, refore, must be destroyed. It is a threat to civilised society. I really think that if the gressive intellectuals had their way they uld raze Blackpool to the ground and sow With salt, long before they would abolish public schools.

et me give a few examples. On the out- rts of Blackpool there rises an extraordin- castle of a hotel, a great castellated mon- osity, in which I usually stay. The rooms far from comfortable, and it is none too n. Yet the staff is very friendly, call one V, and generally do their limited best. It the kind of hotel that could not possibly e even the most unsophisticated visitor a !al inferiority complex, which is presum- Y why, despite its deficiencies, it has so at a clientele. I cannot pretend that I staying there, but if one arrives de- ned to rough it a little it is really quite exPerience, ell, a few years ago that great pro• gressive journalist, James Cameron, put up in this particular hotel, and the very next day caused a sensation by attacking it with almost hysterical fury in the columns of a national newspaper. It reminded him, he wrote, of Buchenwald and Belsen. A few years later that other liberal luminary, Bernard Levin, waxed equally indignant, publicly insulting the mayor in his parlour by describing the town as 'an elephant's anus'. And this year we had Peter Jenkins, the Guardian's col- umnist, maintaining the anal analogy with a piece entitled 'Golden Piles'.

`Staying in Blackpool', he writes, 'is a kind of psycho-drama, a symbolic fight for exist- ence in a desert of pleasure and plenty . . . It excites in the visitor a sense of national decline. The idea of building a 'better to- morrow' or a 'new Britain' becomes inher- ently ludicrous after a few days here . . . `Those of us who hate the place . . .9 and much more in the same vein, including a crack at the `smartest' restaurant in town, the Louis Seize, `named, it is said, after the chef who invented tin opening by guillotine'.

The extraordinary thing is that Cameron, Levin and Jenkins are kindly people who do not usually go around insulting their fellow citizens for the fun of it. But when it comes to Blackpool they seem to feel that they have some form of mission to perform, even if this does mean behaving in a manner that is really rather bloody.

Take, for example, that crack in Peter Jenkins's article about the Louis Seize res- taurant. Admittedly it is not a very good res- taurant. But it tries touchingly hard to be good, and obviously has a local reputation for being quite something. I would imagine that the kind of very dressed-up French food that it serves, with lashings of wine and brandy poured into every dish, is just what its clientele expect and appreciate. So what is the point of gratuitously holding up the chef and the head waiter to sophisticated mockery? (Or do these liberal columnists assume that the working classes cannot read.) I happened to be with Peter Jenkins when he arrived for dinner at this same restaurant on the day his contemptuous reference to it had appeared. Needless to say, the staff were very hurt, as the hotel staff had been by Cameron and the Mayor by Levin. Did this worry Mr Jenkins? Not a bit. From the bold and proud way in which he strode through the room, gathering the plaudits of his fellow sophisticates, one would have thought he had struck some splendid blow for freedom.

The question that interests me is why a seaside resort which manifestly gives much pleasure to those for whom it is designed should have become such a provocation to the progressive left. The answer, I am afraid, is rather clear. Blackpool maddens them be- cause it shows the working class as they really are rather than as the left would like them to be; shows them to be resolutely old- fashioned, provocatively insular, shockingly low-brow, persistently racialist (how the crowds love that two-headed negress), un ashamedly vulgar, very easily pleased with very little, undemanding and uncomplain- ing—the very opposite, that is, of what socialism would wish them to be.

To walk down the streets of Blackpool. to eavesdrop on the.conversations on the front, to observe the illuminations, to imbibe the atmosphere of the place in all its strange par- ticulars, is to realise how splendidly resistant to the whole contemporary process of cul- tural and social indoctrination the ordinary people of England actually are.

Quite clearly there is a whole stratum of English life which has no desire to better itself in the sense of adopting progressive middle class standards and values; which has no intention of becoming trendy and avant- garde, no desire to get 'with it', which still gets immense pleasure and satisfaction from being working class and is determined to stay just that. 'The idea of building a "better tomorrow" or a "new Britain" becomes in- herently ludicrous', writes Mr Jenkins with despair. How right he is. That is what pro- gressives so hate about Blackpool: the evidence it supplies of how little the itch to change is shared by ordinary people. There they are, walking down the front, gawping, drinking, leering, having a wonderful time, NOW, in this unreconstructed capitalist hell, showing no awareness that they are living in a cultural desert, displaying no desire for higher standards, no yearning for the Arts Council to improve the quality of the 'Illum- inations', no inclination to invite Lord Snow- don to re-design the zoo, no interest in impressing Raymond Postgate, no concern about the Race Relations Act, no respect for foreign susceptibilities; behaving, in short, with brazen naturalness without the slightest reference to any canons of taste and pro- priety other than their own.

Blackpool is one gigantic cocked snook at `gracious living', a roaring blasphemy against all the gods of fashion, a living, pullulating denial of the efficacy of public education, an island of reaction in a sea of progress.

No wonder the progressives hate it. Eton has lost touch with its roots, with the boys all bending backwards to model themselves on Mick Jagger. dukes vie with each other to appear modish and swinging, even the Royal Family pays attention to the demands of modernity. Clearly the upper class has been successfully radicalised, caught up in the maelstrom of change, made to conform to the homogenised version of contemporary man. Blackpool, however, is different. Black- pool has not changed. It remains defiantly old-fashioned, a museum piece of genuine working class culture, defiantly oblivious of the winds of progress, and the people love it.

Blackpool, not Eton or the Ritz or the stately homes, is the bastion against which the armies of the left cannot prevail. Those knobbly Lancastrians, set in their awful ways, do not want that `better tomorrow', that `new Britain' because they like things as they are. For the progressive Blackpool is a night- mare. They have got the rest of us on the run, eagerly, frenetically chasing after every new fashion and trend. But Blackpool refuses to budge. Its roots go deep and refuse to be shaken. It actually dares to like things as they are, to be more concerned to enjoy the present than to shape the future.

Such a heresy cannot be condoned. People have no right to be happy in the wrong way. How dare they be content with so little. They must be made to ask for more. The rage of the progressive intellectuals at Black- pool is symptomatic of the dilemma of the left. Today it is no longer the grievances of the people that arouse the indignation. It is their lack of grievances.